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The Whiteness, therefore, in a human being is, clearly, to be
classed not as a quality but as an activity- the act of a power
which can make white; and similarly what we think of as qualities
in the Intellectual Realm should be known as activities; they are
activities which to our minds take the appearance of quality from
the fact that, differing in character among themselves, each of
them is a particularity which, so to speak, distinguishes those
Realities from each other.
What, then, distinguishes Quality in the Intellectual Realm from
that here, if both are Acts?
The difference is that these ["Quality-Activities"] in the
Supreme do not indicate the very nature of the Reality [as do the
corresponding Activities here] nor do they indicate variations of
substance or of [essential] character; they merely indicate what
we think of as Quality but in the Intellectual Realm must still
be Activity.
In other words this thing, considered in its aspect as possessing
the characteristic property of Reality is by that alone
recognised as no mere Quality. But when our reason separates what
is distinctive in these ["Quality-Activities"]- not in the sense
of abolishing them but rather as taking them to itself and making
something new of them- this new something is Quality: reason has,
so to speak, appropriated a portion of Reality, that portion
manifest to it on the surface.
By this analogy, warmth, as a concomitant of the specific nature
of fire, may very well be no quality in fire but an Idea-Form
belonging to it, one of its activities, while being merely a
Quality in other things than fire: as it is manifested in any
warm object, it is not a mode of Reality but merely a trace, a
shadow, an image, something that has gone forth from its own
Reality- where it was an Act- and in the warm object is a
quality.
All, then, that is accident and not Act; all but what is
Idea-form of the Reality; all that merely confers pattern; all
this is Quality: qualities are characteristics and modes other
than those constituting the substratum of a thing.
But the Archetypes of all such qualities, the foundation in which
they exist primarily, these are Activities of the Intellectual
Beings.
And; one and the same thing cannot be both Quality and
non-quality: the thing void of Real-Existence is Quality; but the
thing accompanying Reality is either Form or Activity: there is
no longer self-identity when, from having its being in itself,
anything comes to be in something else with a fall from its
standing as Form and Activity.
Finally, anything which is never Form but always accidental to
something else is Quality unmixed and nothing more.
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